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Rick Santorum and “exceptionalism”: America under attack, all in a day’s work for the Satanic powers

February 22, 2012

Not long ago, I responded to a proposal for a piece on the role of Satan in American politics. It is a great topic, but I did not get the job. Nonetheless, I have been thinking about it. There has also been quite a bit of discussion concerning a somewhat related topic. Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum raised the possibility that the United States was under satanic attack a few years ago, and the matter has come to the surface as his candidacy continues to increase in popularity.Here is the latest from the Huffington Post.

Rick Santorum is making no effort to distance himself from his 2008 remarks about Satan attacking America.

Last week Right Wing Watch dug up a speech Santorum made while McCain and Obama were campaigning. Listen below, and here are some sound bites:

“Satan has his sights on the United States of America!”
“Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.”

“This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost 200 years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.”

In the strictest sense, Santorum is correct. Satan hates America. He also hates Iran, Russia, Argentina, Kenya and every other human jurisdiction. In fact, Satan hates every single living human being. Because of the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, the Evil One has been decisively defeated and is doomed to spend eternity apart from the divine presence and the coming kingdom.

Tucked away in the Santorum proposal is the dangerous idea of American exceptionalism. It is a toxic mix of patriotism gone wild and sentimentalism. Our religious expression is just overflowing with the emotional, soft, gushing, squishy, thoughtless and forgetful form of idolatry. We exchange worship of the King of Kings with a weird kind of ancestor worship intended to justify our civic and individual shortcomings. Think Christmas. Everybody loses touch with reality and gets all woozy over how great things used to be. There is a great deal of self-righteous complaining about how some people try to make a secular holiday out of something that only gave lip service to the One who became human flesh so that we might be saved from our sins and their just condemnation.

We are big on prayer breakfasts and prayer before sports events. Almost everybody has God on the personal speed dial just in case there should be a sudden loss of job, divorce, cancer diagnosis, or other life-altering crisis. Now, about that business of taking up your cross and following Jesus, that seems like a really good idea and somebody is going to give it a try one of these days. In other words, if Satan has his sights set on the USA, it is not because we have ever been some sort of Christian fortress. That is not possible because fallen human beings simply can not do it. Fallen sinful humans always mess things up.

It is probably wise to note here that old Beelzebub would not have to turn in much overtime on that “Bring Down America” project. We seem to be doing just fine without any assistance from the Prince of Darkness. Again, it is that fallen human being thing.